How to Create a Scary Security Cam Horror Effect

I’m feeling a little crazy today, don’t know why… but since I am, I made something creazie. This is a tutorial for creating a scary horror effect in Photoshop. You might wanna call it a photo manipulation but I just focused on the effect rather than adding too many pictures or using many effects.

This kind of effect can be useful for creating posters for movies and clubs. You can enhance the graphic by adding extra bits, and I’ll be giving ideas for these extra bits in the article. I didn’t add them to keep the tutorial brief. I’ll try to make a detailed tutorial, it’ll be long but you’ll love it.

Resources Used

Final Result

Let’s Begin

First of all Open the initial image of the corridor Desaturate it. Then Go to Image>Adjustment>Brightness/Contrast

Now add a new layer and fill it with Solid Black Color. Then go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise and set the layer style to the Soft Light. Opacity = 68%

Making it Scary

Add a new blank layer again and select Natural Brushes from the Brushes Pop-out Menu, then stroke the brush (you can see in the screenshot) on the floor. Now you have to transform it and adjust it according to the floor. I’m using warp command for this adjustment, Go to Edit>Transform>Warp

Here I’m warping the Floor Dirt. I just changed the layer opacity to the 66.

If you know me, you know that my tutorials are never completed without an image of a girl, I don’t even care if she’s a ghost of a cannibal. Here I’m adding and transforming the girl’s image.

I’m adding some blur so that she could look blurry like a ghostly figure…(spooky!) Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur.

Now we want our girl to be scary, let’s add something scary! I’m adding a fist of a barber which has a hand full of hair.

Security Camera Effect

I opened a new file. I’m making the pattern which we’ll apply on the whole image we are creating in the other file. First select Pencil tool then make a 1px (single pixel) line then that goes edge to edge of canvas. Now strike Ctrl+A for marquee selecting the whole image, then Go to Edit>Define Pattern then save the pattern with the name of your choice. You can see the whole process in the screenshot below.

We have applied that pattern all over our image. Now I cut the image from the a stock image and adjust it in the girl’s hand.

More Scares!

Time to add some spices now, I mean the elements which will make our result look more scary. We can add a lot of things here, such as blood drops, some ghostly shadows and stuff like that… but I like cats, so I’m gonna put a cat. And I whitened the eyes of the cat so it could seem beaming and penetrating.

” You must be thinking that I have a terrible choice for scary elements, first I placed a young girl and now a cat… well, I told you I’m feeling crazy. “

Now I’m adding a realistic CCTV Camera image by adding time stamp and other stamps. Below, I’m showing how I made Recording Mark With the help of Rectangle Tool and Eclipse Tool and then add a text on the image. Using the same method I made all the stamps.

To add more spooks, I merged all layer into a single layer and then applied Liquify filter.

Just a few strokes and you are done. Now it seems the camera has captured some metaphysical activity.